if the incoming Trump Administration is behind the federal prosecutor’s apparent intention to charge rioters with ‘felony rioting’ i.e. go for exemplary sentencing, that all by itself justifies the 2016 election.

On Wednesday November 15, the first trial of defendants charged with felony riot and as many as seven other felonies arising out of the Inauguration Daydisturbances is scheduled to begin jury selection. Seven defendants will be in the dock:

Jennifer Armento

Oliver Harris

Brittne Lawson

Michelle Macchio

Christina Simmons

Jayram Tortay

Alexei Wood

If convicted on all counts, their Leftist supporters claim each defendant could accumulate as much as 70 years in prison, and be fined $25,000.

Be still, my heart!

In all, at least 235 defendants, all but five arrested on January 20 (J20 in LeftSpeak), were indicted on felony charges by D.C. grand juries.

Is this a Woody Allen joke—”The riot was lousy—and there wasn’t enough of it!”?

The distinction between bystanders and actors may possibly make sense in discussing a riot, but if one denies, as the defendants’ supporters do, that any riot took place, then the distinction collapses.

The venerable Leftist rag The Nation was also a riot—pun intended. The day before President Trump’s inauguration, it ran a literal call to arms by British-born, Brooklyn-based “anti-fascist” activist Natasha Lennard. She called for unrelenting violence against anyone to the right of Pol Pot, including during the Inauguration the following day:

[Liberals] forget, too, that while the First Amendment ensures that the government will not interfere with free speech, this has no bearing on neo-fascists having the right to be heard or countenanced by the rest of us….

Trump’s inauguration is an opportunity—with regards to spectacle—to set the tone of resistance to come….

One member of the “D.C. counter-inaugural welcoming committee” commented anonymously that housing space for 1,000 visiting radicals, in both church halls and houses, had been organized by their group alone. New York anarchists are raising funds to rent whole buses to attend. And, as historic anti-fascist mass protest dictates, there are plans for a large black bloc—a spectacle both intentionally threatening and anonymizing….

The decision to join the Women’s March or Disrupt #J20 should not be a benchmark for division. This line instead should only be drawn when someone, in professed name of democracy, would sooner condemn or even imprison anti-fascist, anti-racist actors before they would see a ceremony affirming and buoying fascism meet with interference.

But nine months and a day later, The Nation’s editors had developed amnesia about their complicity and acted as if a bunch of Randian libertarians had been rounded up on January 20th

Sam Menefee-Libey of the DC Legal Posse, a group of activists who provide support to the defendants, was more blunt, criticizing the cases as “blatant political prosecutions” designed to “chill resistance.”

Anyway, the distinction between “rioter” and “bystander” is not a given. Conspirators and others may be guilty of rioting, without being active rioters, and one can be guilty of a violent crime via guilt by association. Two legal terms for this are “acting in concert” and “criminal responsibility.”

On Inauguration Day, the situation quickly turned chaotic. Some members of the “protest” a.k.a. riot crowd adopted Black Bloc tactics, hiding their identities and taking part in property destruction. “There were windows breaking, chemicals in the air…The cops didn’t seem to have any control over the situation,” Alex Stokes was quoted as saying in the Intercept article above.

Stokes is another journalist who was arrested on January 20, though the charges against him were later dropped.

Note the phony, passive voice. “The situation” did not “turn chaotic”—the rioters made it so. The rioters did not engage “in minor property destruction”—they incinerated e.g. one stretch limousine after writing slogans on it; they smashed the windows in Larry King’s SUV; they smashed store windows. Windows did not spontaneously break, and chemicals did not spring into the air.

As for the cops not controlling the situation, I doubt Stokes would have appreciated it if they had taken control.

Prosecutors must weave the rioters’ defenders’ sophistry into their closing arguments—to expose the Totalitarian Left’s violence and mendacity, gain felony convictions and defend American liberty.

What’s happened so far:

One defendant has already pleaded guilty to felony riot: Dane Powell.

Unfortunately, and ominously, this case nullified by Presiding Judge of the Criminal Division of the Washington, D.C. Superior Court, Lynn Leibovitz (PDF). Judge Leibovitz sentenced Powell to 36 months in jail for felony rioting and felony assault on a police officer—but suspended all but four months of the sentence, and gave him two years of supervised probation. [Florida Man Sentenced to Prison Term For His Role in Inauguration Day Riot, Press Release, Department of Justice, D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office, July 7, 2017].

Judge Leibovitz also sabotaged

the misdemeanor plea of Cody Stewart.

She sentenced Stewart to 60 days in jail—but suspended all of the jail sentenceon the condition that he complete four months of probation.

During that time, Stewart must perform 50 hours of community service, and pay a $100 fine.

Big whoop.

Leibowitz, let the record show, was appointed by George W. Bush in 2001.

(I’m working on finding out what happened in the other misdemeanor cases—see below).

The Totalitarian Left has been emboldened by years of lack of punishment, and implicit and explicit support from the Ruling Class. They have brought about a moral reversal, in which America’s violent, domestic enemies are treated like moral paragons, while white patriots are treated like criminal pariahs.

If America is to be saved, US Attorney Jessie K. Liu must make these prosecutions a series of teachable moments, and instruct these violent traitors that there is a steep price to be paid for treading the First Amendment and the rule of law under foot.

Nicholas Stix [email him] is a New York City-based journalist and researcher, much of whose work focuses on the nexus of race, crime, and education. He spent much of the 1990s teaching college in New York and New Jersey. His work has appeared in Chronicles, The New York Post, Weekly Standard, Daily News, New York Newsday, American Renaissance, Academic Questions, Ideas on Liberty and many other publications. Stix was the project director and principal author of the NPI report, The State of White America-2007. He blogs at Nicholas Stix, Uncensored.

J20 Defendants Yet to be Tried (Including the First Round of 7): 195

(PDID is the DC Police Department ID number used for tracking arrestees through the court system.)

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An attorney, writer, and political activist in Orlando, Florida, Augustus Invictus is best known as a radical philosopher and social critic. Invictus is a member of the right-wing of the Libertarian Party. He ran for the United States Senate in Florida as a Libertarian in 2016 and formerly served as Chair of the Libertarian party of Orange County.

Invictus earned his B.A. in Philosophy at the University of South Florida in Tampa and his J.D. at DePaul University College of Law in Chicago. Returning to his hometown of Orlando, he studied leadership at Rollins Crummer Graduate School of Business and opened the law firm for which he served as Managing Partner until his retirement from law practice.

A Southerner and a father of five children, Invictus contends that revolutionary conservatism requires a shift in perspective from the exaltation of abstract ideologies to a focus on our families and communities.